Making Hispanic Literatures

Activity: Participating in or organising an event typesParticipation in conference

Description

Crowdfunding as a feminist and cultural instrument Crowdfunding has become an alternative source for financing activities from cultural texts to social movements. Crowdfunding helps to obtain money from many donors to finance projects for which the established industry reject as not “marketable” or “profitable”. In Spain, it is also a channel of activating social/feminist capital and acquiring/sharing cultural capital as shown in the recent case of the award winner writer Angeles Caso. As Caso stated in several interviews, the publishing industry is not interested in publishing books that are costly, thus crowdfunding becomes an alternative to the publishing industry. Caso’s book, Ellas mismas, on women artists who had been constantly silenced and hidden from art’s history has obtained twice the funding amount initially sought. In this paper I will explore some crowdfunding projects as examples of how this new way of financing cultural projects allows people to not only participate in the the dissemination and the financing of cultural/literary texts, but also in feminist campaigns through culture, making visible what patriarchy and neoliberalism effectively make invisible: the great contribution of women to culture and society. The success of these projects stresses the recent surge of feminist collaborative projects (such as Genealogías which aim is publishing poetry books by well-known Spanish women poets) that emphasizes the opening of new spaces from which sorority and solidarity emerge.
Period2016 → …
Event typeConference
LocationReading, United KingdomShow on map

Keywords

  • hispanism
  • culture
  • feminism
  • crowdfunding